The Palms of Both Soiled Hands
by sing-oldsongs
Summary: Grimmauld Place. December 1995. Sirius doesn't know how he can stand to live here every day. SiriusxRemus.
1. Part One: The Letters

_**Summary**__: Grimmauld Place. December 1995. Sirius doesn't know how he can stand to live here every day. Sirius/Remus._

_**Spoilers**__: through OotP_

_**Other Notes**__: Title from T.S. Eliot's poem "Preludes."_

_**Disclaimer**__: I do not own Harry Potter, any of its characters, including and especially Sirius and Remus, or any of its settings. I also do not own the title. That would be Eliot's.  
_

**x**

**Part One: The Letters**

Sometimes Sirius can still feel the dirt on him. Sometimes he can't scrub his skin hard enough to get it off.

**x**

The Black house is old and desolate and dying; everyone knows this and it's why they don't stay. In winter, the wind comes in harsh gusts around the edges of the windows, whistling and blowing back the curtains. Sirius knows the house inside and out; he knows which windows are the shakiest, which rooms collect the most cold.

December first comes around, and brings with it a new coating of snow on the streets and the one lone tree outside Sirius's bedroom window. Everyone has gone home, and Remus is out on Order business, and somehow Sirius finds himself slipping into Remus's room. He steals one of Moony's jumpers from his old school trunk: his desperate attempt to keep out the chill.

He is still wearing it when Remus gets back. He has also found an old collection of letters that Remus never sent to him, and he doesn't bother to hide the stack of parchment when the door opens, even though he heard his old friend's footsteps coming from all the way down the hall.

"Padfoot," is all he says. Some days it is the only thing he says. Sirius can tell what the rest of the words are—the words he doesn't want to or can't say—from the tone, and the slight variance Sirius has learned between _I'm sorry_ and _I'm sad_ and _I'm scared_. Today it is a combination of the first two. Today it is Remus's eyes blinking slowly.

"Don't leave anymore and maybe I won't read your stuff."

"I don't care, Sirius. They're old anyway."

Remus answers like the conversation is over, but he doesn't leave the doorway. Sirius shivers within the warm threads of the Moony jumper. The glass of Remus's window rattles with the force of the wind seeping in, just like in Sirius's room, another thing that they share.

"Maybe you should have told me then, Moony."

"It wasn't important."

Sirius wants to tell him that he is wrong, that it _is_, it _is_ important. If he had known all those things then, maybe he would have changed things; maybe he wouldn't have been such an arse. Maybe he would have held on harder—just that little bit more—maybe he could have avoided losing everything, and ending up alone in the large and empty rooms of the Black house, with all of its old ghosts.

**x**

Sirius's skin is red. There are lines across it, scars and wrinkles, and he is old. He's not even forty, and he is old. Soap will not rid him of all the dirt and grime that has become a part of him; long showers that take up the morning will not make him feel clean. He tries anyway, unwilling to give up, and by the time he steps out, Remus has arrived home.

**x**

The length of Remus's trips varies, or so he says, when he tells Sirius how long he'll be gone. Sometimes he'll leave for a week or more, and he'll send Sirius an owl to tell him how things are going. For Sirius, all time passes much the same, and when Moony is gone he can't tell if an hour or a year has passed from his departure to his return.

To pass the time, Sirius sometimes slips into the old library, where he used to sit and read adventure stories and mysteries when it was too hot or too cold to go outside. The room has a high vaulted ceiling, and many bookshelves line the walls and form low rows across the room, housing their hundreds upon hundreds of volumes. It is somehow different from what Sirius remembers, darker and dustier and more foreboding.

He is surprised to remember that it is almost Christmas. The realization fills him with that feeling that wants to remember the past, and the memories of former holidays make him almost smile.

He begins to bring down Christmas decorations from the attic. The occasional box of them will trip Remus up while he walks, and Sirius watches from doorways and the shadows where he sometimes clings, from odd ingrained habit that he cannot shake. Remus falls into habit easily, too, but he has always been that way. It is part of his comfort.

It is difficult to know what to get a friend like Remus for Christmas. Sirius sits in the library to think.

**x**

end part 1/5


	2. Part Two: The Library

**Part Two: The Library **

The library is colder than even the rest of the house, if that is possible, and Sirius begins to wonder if he will ever feel warm again. It is difficult even to try, walking amid the grimacing portraits of all of those who share his blood, who lived and breathed and died and rotted right in these same rooms.

There are few and precious moments when his blood begins to flow again, like the night, not many nights passed, when the fire glowed against the edges of the room, and glinted against the Christmas ornaments. The tree was newly set up, and Remus was stringing lights around its branches, and Sirius forgot to shiver for a moment, maybe two.

In their first flat, young kids of just eighteen—and it's funny how Sirius thinks of it as their flat, when he bought it for himself alone, in seventh year—in their first flat they were always sleeping close together for warmth. Sirius would always pretend to complain, but somewhere on the inside he always knew that there was no better way to fall asleep than with his arms wrapped Moony, knees bumping and toes touching, nose to collarbone.

In the middle of the night, Remus would get up for extra blankets. He wore thick woolen socks too big for his feet, and they muffled his footsteps. He always kept a book on the bedside table. Sirius remembers the details sharply, cobwebs and dust floating away like the ghosts of the Blacks that he wipes off the books with the back of his hand.

When he goes back upstairs, he checks, just for his peace of mind. But he knows the book will be there, like it always was, before he even opens the door. It is a sure thing: Remus and his old words, his pages bent back and dog eared to mark his place.

**x**

Sirius knows, now, that sex isn't about lust. It is not, at least, completely about lust, though that is still a part of it, of course. He smiles to himself, at his emotions, which are perhaps even stronger after all those years he tried to keep them down.

**x**

Remus arrives back from his trips at odd times of the day, varied and unstable times, so that Sirius never knows when to expect him. Sometimes it is the early hours of the morning, sometimes it is when Sirius is counting the minutes to midnight, sometimes it is when he is eating lunch with Kingsley or Tonks. No matter where he is, he always hears it—or maybe he feels it—the almost imperceptible sound of a closing door, and the sigh that Remus sighs after he draws in air.

Remus's hair is slightly windswept when he shows up in the kitchen, and Sirius asks if it is cold out, even though he already knows.

"Freezing," Remus answers. "I'm glad to be inside." His words are short and there are creases around his eyes, but he is smiling, to be friendly. Remus is a good person. He is doing his part, living with Sirius as he does.

When Sirius goes upstairs, after talking with Remus about this and that and how did it go and is it as terrible as we thought and again and again and again with the questions and the worry and it never ends—he stops to try to fix the window in Remus's room. Nothing works. He doesn't know if it's the window or the spell, or maybe if it's just him.

Remus appears in the doorway and asks if something is wrong. Remus is always hanging around doorways, a whisper away from stepping in.

**x**

Sirius is glad there were no mirrors in Azkaban. He is glad there was nothing around for him to look into, to see the gradual decaying of his appearance. His bones stick through his skin now, and his joints creak, and he has tattooed marks of prison emblazoned on his skin. His eyes are circled permanently purple.

**x**

_Remus's eyes were shifting before he even asked, and Sirius was a little surprised at the question when it was finally said. Do I like the way you look? he answered. Come on, Moony, you look like you always do._

_Remus shook his head, dipped his gaze down to his shoes in one soft, fluid movement, his eyes never lifting to Sirius's face. He ran one finger across his nose, almost absently. His scars stood out against his skin._

_Sirius understood, and felt foolish._

_Even with…he started, and couldn't finish. Remus never worried about anything except grades, and responsibility, and keeping Sirius and James from killing themselves somehow. To worry about what he looked like was an alien idea, because for Sirius it would have been shallow, and Moony wasn't shallow. Not even in his worries was he shallow. Things were just different for him._

**x**

Sirius pretends to forget to put the letters back where he found them. When Remus leaves on trips, he puts on the old jumper and smells its Moony smell, and sometimes he even revisits the old words, their familiar slant, the way the y's always leaned to the left.

Maybe he was blind, he thinks, maybe he had to be blind, never to see that someone cared about what happened to him. That someone wanted very much for him to be the best friend, not the traitor in their midst.

**x**

Sirius knows that sex isn't just about lust. He knows that attraction isn't just about the way you look. He feels the dirt clinging to him at odd times, like in the middle of dinner (an odd itching between his shoulder blades), or just before an Order meeting is adjourned (when his palms start to crawl with stray bits of dust). He looks across the table at Remus and wonders if he recognizes what he sees, if he could truly love a man like this now.

**x**

Sirius gets Remus books for Christmas. He decides on the gift in the week before the holiday, while staring out the window—as he always used to do waiting for an idea to come to him—and thinking over Remus in his head.

The first book is from the library, a vast and ancient and intellectual room Sirius thinks Remus would like very much, if it wasn't in the Black house and if Remus had more time. In another life, to give a book from his own family's house would be not quite fair, but in the life Sirius now leads, the rules have been rearranged. The gift itself is actually the final prize after many days of effort, of searching, of sudden spells and dodges and wounds. Nothing in the Black house gives itself up easily, not even the books. They are old and their spines are cracked and they have dark spots on some of their pages, but for Remus they sparkle like jewels beneath the dust. Sirius hopes this symbolizes something, something about them.

The second book is not a Black book, or a bought book either, from Diagon Alley or any of the Muggle London shops. It is halfway to non-existence; it is dragged back from the edge. It is Sirius's second symbol. He writes the word _Moony_ in the corner of the first page with a hand that twitches, in letters that shake, that stutter at their edges. It was how he wrote letters when every word was a lie, and it is how he is writing now when every word is the uttermost truth. He knows that only Remus would recognize that handwriting now, that Sirius from long ago.

**x**

end part 2/5


	3. Part Three: The Past

**Part Three: The Past**

It is three days before Christmas, and Remus is sitting next to Sirius and staring at the tree. The room is still, and the ornaments glint, and the lights blink slowly, in and out. The air is chilled and they are both wearing jackets to trap heat. Sirius has Remus's old letters in his pocket. He wants to say something about them. He wants to move closer, and maybe kiss Moony, his old friend, on the mouth with lips that are permanently chapped, hold him with arms that are weak with too many years of malnutrition and wasting away.

Sirius stares at the tree, mostly, but sometimes he looks at Remus, whom he knows very well. Moony's eyes jump from thing to thing, never still, never resting, never tired. When they happen to meet Sirius's, he looks quickly away, and sighs just slightly. Sirius notices no matter how soft the sound, because it comes from Remus, and to Remus he is always acutely attuned.

"Do you want to leave, Moony?" he asks. His voice is low and the question hangs between them, suspended on the air. He could just as easily mean _leave the room_ as _leave the house_ but they both know it's the second that Sirius intends.

"No," Remus answers. His voice is slightly louder. It is a professor-voice, Sirius thinks, used to stealing attention, retaining order. "I actually do like living here, Sirius, no matter what you think."

"Liar." Sirius feels the blood returning to his veins, rushing in that sudden and unexpected accusation. "This house is hell, absolute burning hell. Maybe you'd know that if you didn't always have the option of leaving."

And for a few minutes, Remus does look at him. It is unfair, Sirius thinks: Remus's gazes always made him weak.

"Maybe I leave for a few days, Padfoot, but I could never leave for good."

Sirius thinks there is hope for something, here.

**x**

The water in the Black house is always warm, no matter how long you leave it running. Sirius stays in the shower a long time, his eyes closed against the hot drops falling against his face. He feels his skin begin to scald and burn, and he hopes, somehow, that if it leaves him—if it burns itself right off—he will grow a new skin back. When you escape the dead to come back to the living (even if the living is just an old friend, who stands in your doorway for an hour, so that you're not talking to yourself for once), anything begins to seem possible.

**x**

The second book was Sirius's in Azkaban. Another prisoner gave it to him, a quick hand over amid the shuffling masses, one of few times Sirius would breathe the air outside his cell for twelve full years. The man was young. Sirius still remembers him, in odd and striking details so clear, it might have been yesterday that he was remembering, not a short moment over a decade in the past. He hadn't been in prison long, only a few weeks—enough time to quiet the burning, flowing, erupting rage he'd felt as they led him in, but not so long that he could dull the ache of everything he'd lost.

The man never told Sirius of his crimes, but his guilty conscience etched itself across his face. Sirius remembers his eyes most of all: their wild, crazed look, and how they never blinked, but almost as clear is the memory of the man's wild hair—its strange spikes and tangles, a parody of James's own unruly strands—and his gruff voice and his cackling laugh. "I'm the only one on this whole fucking island to keep my mind," the man whispered. "The only fucking one. But I'll lose it—I'll lose it if you don't take this"—he thrust the small notebook into Sirius's hands—"Take it. I don't care what you do with it. Every time I read it…the words, motherfucker, the goddamned words…."

And then he started crying, and then the Dementors came, and then Sirius's mind blanks out on the memory.

Only later did he realize that the book was nothing but empty pages, and he felt a little guilty, that he was only stealing from this man, too. This prisoner, this criminal, this maniac—nothing could stop him from reliving whatever he thought he was reading, the scenes and the words and the people inside his head.

Visitors came to Azkaban infrequently. The first one that Sirius saw, several days later, wearing a suit and looking out of place and terrified amid the decay and the death and the insanity, Sirius preyed upon. He stuck his hands out through the bars and grabbed at the man's jacket, and put the gleam into his eye that he'd learned to control, the one that Peter put there, the one that made him look mad. "A pen," he cried. "A pen, or I'll do it." And he clawed his finger up to the man's shoulder, bleeding nails leaning towards his neck.

With his new acquisition, Sirius was finally able to fill the empty notebook with words. He wrote pages and pages, paragraphs about his innocence and guilt, about his fear, about his former happiness—anything to keep his mind untainted, anything to keep him human. It was too painful to address the words to James, too fake to write to Lily, too bitter to even think of confessing to Peter. So he wrote to the only person he had left, the only person who still felt real. He wrote to Moony.

He knew—thought he knew—that Remus would die hating him. He never guessed he would be given a second chance. He wouldn't have believed it, if someone had told him, that the second chance included Remus's sharp hug, his professor clothes against Sirius's rags, his assurance whispered in grainy tones in Sirius's ear, that he believed in innocence, not just in absolution for the guilty.

**x**

end part 3/5


	4. Part Four: The Present

**Part Four: The Present **

Sirius adds one more page of written words to the book, right at the very end, where they are almost lost amid the scrawling lines of his handwriting. Then he ties it to the first book with a piece of old string, and leaves it on the table next to Moony's bed. Neither of them mentions it. Sirius pretends he didn't get Remus anything, and won't look up when a gift is pressed into his hands.

**x**

The water is warm in the Black house, but the rooms are cold, and heating charms only work for so long before they begin to wear off. Sirius tries all the different versions he can think of, but he can't help feeling that none of them work as well as they used to. He remembers days long past, spent with Remus in their old flat that even _smelled_ of cold, experimenting with different combinations of spells, until they fell down exhausted and used old fashioned blankets and long kisses to ward off the freeze that was biting at their fingers and their toes.

Life isn't like that now.

Christmas isn't like he was hoping, either, with Arthur in the hospital and the Weasleys in his kitchen, ringed around the table and staring straight ahead. They are overwhelmed with exhaustion and worry, and Sirius doesn't know quite where to look or what to say or not to say, or what to do. He wonders if Harry feels that way, too. It is a sad thing to realize that he spends most of his time, now, in rooms with people scarred by ever-present visions of death.

He can't go with them to visit Arthur, but Remus does, and when he comes back, he mentions that he met another werewolf there, and when he says it, his voice is so even that Sirius knows the truth. He can see the anger that is skidding underneath his surface—he recognizes it in the way that he recognizes his own anger, right before it overwhelms him and he can no longer think at all—and he keeps himself from asking any questions. Remus provides a few details anyway. He tells Sirius about the man, in his late twenties, defensive and wary with the wariness of animals, overwhelmed by a second nature he is not used to and cannot control; he tells Sirius about the pervading sense of prejudice that followed them, the misunderstanding and the fear that they could both discern, that hung around them like poison.

No one sees Remus angry about being a werewolf. All they see is his resignation, and the short glimmers of strength beneath his tired stance and easy words. Sirius is the only one who has seen the other side, who has seen Remus yell, and break things in his rage, and become, even in daylight, so much like an animal that Sirius has to search, for a split second moment or two, to see the humanity there.

**x**

Remus's gift is France. It is a book of Muggle and wizard pictures of France. Sirius has to admit to himself that he likes the Muggle ones best, because for a second in their stillness, he feel like he is there, just watching a scene that won't change quickly, won't right before his eyes be gone.

**x**

Sirius asks Remus once if he likes the way he (Sirius) looks. Remus was reading, at the time, and he is visibly startled for a moment, before his composure returns. He hadn't realized Sirius was in his doorway, watching and waiting.

"What do you mean, Padfoot?" he asks, in the steadiest of all his steady voices.

Sirius has accidentally found himself with Christmas carols playing in his head, and their tunes against his ears are incongruous to the situation. They are too happy for the way his feet feel like lead. Remus has just called him by his old name, but it is a painful sound, because it reminds him that he calls Remus "Moony" more than Remus calls him "Padfoot."

"I mean what I said," Sirius answers.

Remus almost smiles, but it is only a twitch, and in an instant, it's gone. He sets his book down. It is Sirius's, from Azkaban. It is practically falling apart under human touch.

"I'm not going to answer that," he says, and sounds almost sad as he does.

"Fair enough," Sirius tells him. He starts to turn, pauses, adds, "Moony," like an afterthought, and, "I like you scars."

**x**

end part 4/5


	5. Part Five: January

**Part Five: January **

Remus doesn't kiss Sirius under mistletoe. He doesn't kiss Sirius on New Year's Eve, either, at that moment when this year becomes last year and next year this. He doesn't kiss Sirius in a sudden and passionate way.

Remus doesn't kiss Sirius at all.

**x**

It is January, and Sirius is putting the Christmas decorations away, and taking down the tree. The holidays are over; Harry is back at school; the Weasleys and the other Order members have returned to their homes. The sudden, sharp, emptiness of the big house makes it seem even more desolate than before.

Remus stands in the doorway for a long time before Sirius notices his presence. It is only after he has picked up a particularly large box of glass ornaments that he turns around and notices, and in his surprise, the box almost slips from his hands. Remus is next to him to catch it before its contents break. He pauses for a moment to make sure his grip on it is steady, and then he sets the box down carefully, ornaments unharmed.

Sirius realizes that Remus is wearing a red Santa Claus hat on his head.

"You look ridiculous," Sirius says. He was going to say _You scared the shit out of me_, but somehow, his words never turn out like he plans.

"I know," Remus answers. Then he takes the hat off and puts it on Sirius's head, and adds, "I like the way you look, Padfoot."

Remus's voice is steady, and quiet, and Sirius finds that he can't look away. He finds that he can actually, tangibly, feel the silence of the house, the slow, pulsing beat of something almost dead slowly finding life again.

The hat is a terribly stupid looking thing, and Sirius is sure he looks as ridiculous in it as Remus did, with the white cotton ball end of it swinging in front of his eyes. He reaches out slowly and pushes it back. His hand feels heavy, and the movement is difficult. Sirius hasn't cried since the night when James and Lily died (_he doesn't even show any remorse,_ they said, _he doesn't even look upset over the friends he betrayed_), but suddenly he feels like he might.

"It's like I'm in Azkaban all the time," he says—or tries to say, because he's really just making almost unintelligible choking sounds that barely manage to twist themselves into words. "I can still feel it…_clinging_ to me."

Remus doesn't say that he knows. He doesn't, and he won't pretend; he won't lie for the sake of comfort. Instead, he nods his head a little, and holds Sirius up with two hands to his arms, then two arms around his body; he keeps Sirius from falling the same way he kept the box of ornaments from falling.

Remus doesn't say that it will be okay, because he doesn't know that it will. He can offer no words of genuine reassurance, so he offers only what he can: a steady counter-weight for Sirius to lean into; the warmth of another, living, human being; and the knowledge, in his simple presence alone, that love still exists.

**x**

Sirius has learned, just as Remus has learned, that not to trust someone is the worst thing you can do.

**x**

Sirius doesn't kiss Remus under mistletoe. He doesn't kiss Remus on New Year's Eve, either. He kisses him while clearing out Christmas decorations, while taking down a season and putting it away. He kisses him just as they are about to leave the room. They are stopped for a moment in a doorway, the threshold of two places, the pause before the movement foreword.

**x**

end part 5/5

**x**

_**Final Author's Note**: Thank you very much to everyone who has reviewed this story. I haven't read it in its entirety since I finished writing it in 2005, and when I do read it over, I find that I still have big portions of it memorized. So, I really can't be objective about it, and hearing other people's opinions is always appreciated. I hope everyone who has read has enjoyed it. I realize only now that it is a dark story in some ways, but I think it ends quite hopefully, really. As long as you forget what happens at the end of OotP. _

_So, enough rambling. This is why I've been forcing myself not to write author's notes the entire time. I'm afraid my power's going to go out from the storm outside anyway..._


End file.
